Poem of the Day: ‘The Literary Lady’

In the argument that art does not lead inevitably to virtue, let us present Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (1751–1816) as Exhibit A. He was a womanizer, a social climber, a backstabber. His closest associates mistrusted and despised him, even as they laughed at his jokes. Everybody knows the weary old trope that bad people commit good art (and its corollary, personified in yesterday’s poet, Stephen Duck, that good people are doomed to mediocrity), but Sheridan, with all his gifts of political acumen and dazzling comedy, was in a league of his own. He gambled and lost money. He seduced women and threatened to blackmail them. When they resisted either sort of advance, he assaulted them; one woman described his biting her cheek “so violently that the blood ran down my neck.” On his deathbed, attended by an old lover, he vowed to return and haunt her the rest of her days. Even she was repulsed at this point — the real surprise is that she had shown up at all — and Sheridan died the next day, impoverished in both funds and friends, utterly alone. Does knowing what the man was like change the way we read today’s Poem of the Day? Certainly the poem’s pentameter couplets sparkle, as Sheridan’s writing often sparkled, with detail and cleverness. He gives us a new generation’s vision of the Celias and Julias of the previous century, whose disordered dress so charmed Ben Jonson and his literary sons. Here, in her boudoir, we have Corilla, her name a mashup of the older poets’ archetypal Stellas and Corinnas. Her charming disorder beguiles all the more because she’s trying to write, poor thing. Perhaps, after all, even if we didn’t know what we know about Sheridan, we might intuit the sneer in the speaker’s voice. Dear silly Corilla, she sets out to write a play and ends in writing a grocery list, while the unpaid bills mount up on every surface of her room. Even if we didn’t know what we know, we might still feel, at her window, how the wind looking in blows cold. The Literary Lady by Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan What motley cares Corilla’s mind perplex, Whom maids and metaphors conspire to vex! In studious dishabille behold her sit, A lettered gossip and a household wit; At once invoking, though for different views, Her gods, her cook, her milliner and muse. Round her strewed room a frippery chaos lies, A checkered wreck of notable and wise, Bills, books, caps, couplets, combs, a varied mass, Oppress the toilet and obscure the glass; Unfinished here an epigram is laid, And there a mantua-maker’s bill unpaid. There new-born plays foretaste the town’s applause, There dormant patterns pine for future gauze. A moral essay now is all her care, A satire next, and then a bill of fare. A scene she now projects, and now a dish; Here Act the First, and here, Remove with Fish. Now, while this eye in a fine frenzy rolls, That soberly casts up a bill for coals; Black pins and daggers in one leaf she sticks, And tears, and threads, and bowls, and thimbles mix.___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘The Literary Lady’

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